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A hacker can give birth or death to anyone

The rush to digitize the deaths has become easier to get someone malicious minds alive is declared dead by the authorities. Something that showed computer specialists last week for its annual meeting in Las Vegas.

“This is a global problem,” said computer security specialist, Australian Chris Rock, during his presentation entitled: “I’ll kill you”.

Spoofing issue

According to research by Rock, the process of declaring a person officially dead involves getting a death certificate, for which a doctor fill out a form and a funeral home another.

Once the forms are registered online, a certificate stating the legally deceased is generated.

But a fatal flaw in the system is that people can easily be presented as actual medical or funeral directors, Rock showed the surprised audience.

Doctors who practice general medicine often do not bother to create accounts online portals dedicated to enter information about deaths. So a candidate for ‘virtual murderer’ can take advantage of this vacuum to steal the identity of a doctor only have access to your name, address and license number, all elements that are easily accessible on the Internet.

Then, thanks to records also available online, is easy to invent the cause of death using language and appropriate referrals, careful to mention that yes causes that could justify an autopsy.

“Kill whoever you want”

It is also easy to “borrow” the identity of a person responsible for a funeral. In that case the necessary information is also available online.

In the case of Rock, created a website for a non-existent funeral and used to support your request for an account director. Two days later they confirmed that they had approved the request.

With those two elements, deaths may be registered in the real world. “You could kill whoever you want,” Rock told AFP after the presentation.

Virtual babies

Even easier is to obtain birth certificates for babies exist because for registering births only a physician and parents is needed.

“Once you sign up as a doctor can not just kill someone, but even declare a birth,” said Rock.

When these virtual babies reach adulthood their hackers creators could use them to get loans, equity securities exchange or even open bank accounts.

The chilling possibilities are raised by Rock in his book “The harvest of babies: how virtual babies become the future financing of terrorism and money laundering”.